A Modernist Master Revamps his House near Paris

American architects today are tactful, finding it axiomatic to integrate a new building seamlessly with surrounding structures. But contextualism is hardly new. In France architects have long practiced the art of urban diplomacy. In Paris the harmony of the façades resides in their agreement across the centuries. Each period evolved its own variant of classicism in a polite, ongoing visual conversation that rivaled the repartee sparkling in the salons inside. The façades speak to each other across time, and they are always on their best behavior.

But turn a corner onto the rue de Longchamp and meet the residence that belongs to France’s chief architectural mischief maker, Claude Parent. Gray and black, with crimson racing through it, the house steals the whole street. A graphic composition of shifted blocks on the lower two floors, the design has a change of mind on the third floor and pivots into flyaway diagonals that set it off on a more altitudinous mission.

If, top to bottom, the house looks completely fresh, credit Parent for vision—he designed the two-story base exactly a half century ago and recently added a third floor and a roof terrace, shifting the whole composition onto new aesthetic footing.

When Parent designed this thesis house in 1953, he intended it to break with the traditional context—to rupture “the homogeneity and seek a shock. I wanted to achieve a striking aesthetic difference that would affirm modernity,” he says.

He cites neo-Plasticism, a movement closely aligned with the work of early-20th-century De Stijl artists and designers Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld that also took direct aim at the reigning position of Le Corbusier, who advocated pure Euclidean forms. “In neo-Plasticism, the line is more important than the volume,” says Parent. “It introduces very powerful graphics into architecture.” The architect striated the façade with black lines and red awnings, all converging on a fresco at the center, painted by André Bloc, the polymath artist, architect and publisher. Parent was then a young man belonging to an avant-garde group headed by Bloc, who called for the integration of the arts.

The house of an architect, particularly a feverishly restless one, is a petri dish of ideas, and over the decades Parent’s went through several renovations. A new family need—his daughter’s birth or a home office—usually prompted the alteration. In one phase the architect, famous for developing what he calls “the function of the oblique,” recast the house into a tectonic hillside of oblique planes, with floors and ceilings rising and falling in ways that heightened the physical sensation of simply walking across a room.

The most recent reason for renovation was Parent’s need for a studio. While maintaining an office on the first floor, he needed an additional room for drawing the utopian visions that absorb part of his working day. The structure could only expand upward, but adding a story to a position statement required another statement of position. Parent had to decide whether to knit the extension into the original façade or build in contradistinction to it. “The aesthetic problem was how to reconcile the existing horizontal and the new vertical,” he says. “I hesitated between contrast and homogeneity but opted finally for a composite.”

Parent placed a square black frame on the façade, at the joint between the second and third floors, and pivoted it 45 degrees, balancing it on its corner to make the transition clear and also unify the two directions. He perpetuated Bloc’s mural by painting his own—but on the diagonal, so that he virtually turns the new façade.

In the contexts of his career and Paris’s intellectual hothouse climate, the move is pregnant with meaning. Parent, an avuncular man with a ready chuckle that belies his crackling intelligence, is legendary in France as a risk-taking architect of great originality, with a body of work, including nuclear silos, substantiated by a body of theory: The enfant terrible of French architecture is now its éminence grise. For Parent, the history of most European architecture has been characterized by a search for stability, with clear lines that explain the flow of gravity. The upended square introduces instead its unstable opposite. “When things are continuous, you have to find the significant break,” he says. “You can’t live in infinity. I am a champion of fracture.”

The 1953 façade was only inches deep, yet by articulating window frames, balusters and awnings, Parent was able to give it the illusion of depth. But, he explains, “It’s the interior, inside the volume, where I developed the third dimension with great liberty.” Every aspect of the living room and the master bedroom on the second floor, from columns and pipes to the Italian sofa and lacquered cabinets, now takes part in what he calls “the composition and decomposition of space.” Element after element, he layers the rooms so that they add up to an interior forest with a complexity bordering on the bewildering. Throughout, Parent blacks out the floor with a jet wool carpet, not because black is chic but because it is bottomless and, therefore, spatial. The furniture appears to float.

Within this complexity, Parent sets two Rosetta stones that suggest alternative readings of the space. A reproduction of a sticklike Red/Blue chair by Rietveld stands as an emblem in the living room, an example of the neo-Plastic principles that informed Parent’s 1953 design. But the emblem of the newest renovation is the bookshelf in the master bedroom, turned at an angle, like the pivoted square outside. Within it Parent even files books and hangs a picture at an angle, upending expectations about proper behavior.

“Instead of being a space of rest, like a cocoon, a building must ask you questions that are difficult to absorb,” he says. “I believe it shouldn’t give you comfort but should be aggressive, even violent. Architecture must instigate.”